Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Walls of Jericho pt.1 - The Cover

For those not about to scroll, I present to you again:

One
of the stupidest Heavy Metal covers that I've ever seen. Really. But
it'd take me a long while to understand why it's stupid. It's worth
mentioning that I never thought this cover was cool, not even as a 12
year old. It looked too weird and plastic to be scary. The giant
destroying the wall looked to me as if he were wearing a mask, that
this wasn't his real face. Why else would he have human hands?

I'm
an artist now, I certainly wasn't at twelve, but there's things even
a twelve year old sees from an aesthetic standpoint. They just take
them at face value instead of criticizing them. It's supposed
to look weird.
For example, the broken parts of the bulwark that are flying about
look like they're made from tinfoil or something. There's just too
much highlight and liquidity to the forms, now I realize. I do like
(and I liked as a child as well) the bits of storytelling to this
cover. There's footsteps in the sand leading up to the scene, so this
giant has traveled an epic journey to come smash these walls. And I
do think the person flying off at top is kinetically well-done, I do
believe he's screaming for his life wondering why his God wouldn't
help him. Wait.

So...
yes. As I understand it, this cover, along with the name of the
record are a reference (and an intro to “Ride the Sky”) to the
biblical tale of the Israelites marching, their trumpets bringing
down the walls and all that. I had no knowledge of this story when I
got this record, and for some years after, actually. I read the Bible
mostly for polemic reasons as a very angry fifteen year old or so.
That aspect of this cover, now known to me, only serves to make this
cover look even more silly. Helloween are telling us that this
monster (which even at twelve I realized from my brother's Iron
Maiden covers was an Eddie rip-off) is an agent of God of some sort?
Well that's... nice. 12 year old Helm had no idea what white metal
was at that point and just how many power metal bands (especially
from the U.S). had a crypto-biblical message in their lyrics. Were
Helloween a Christian band? Not very much, at this point. They would
turn to even more positive Christian-lite apologetic sloganeering
with age, and especially with their drastic lineup shifts. The jump
from this, their debut to their 'Keeper of the Seven Keys' follow-up
is very dramatic, though. This record's got a lot of bite to it, even
the cover is violent, at least.

Other
things my 12 year old self noted and I still find funny about this
cover: the muppetface spearman running towards us in the bottom right
corner. The one chance for the cover artist to inject some human
pathos into the situation and it turns out they can't draw faces to
save their life. This must have been even worse in the original LP
size. The way the artist gave up drawing proper masonry on the far
wall, instead sticking to the Chris Achilleo patented solution of
'stick a sporadic brick texture in there and they'll buy it'. Less
bad but still kind of funny is the airbrush sunset in the horizon.
This technique, now very out of fashion is therefore very obviously
dated. Some people have a soft spot of airbrushed Heavy Metal covers.
I don't enjoy the muddy result even when I do enjoy the naive
motifs.

Other things
I liked and continue to like about this cover: There's a real sense
of impact to the wall punch, I'll give the artist that. Good parallel
action with closer people shocked at the event and further people
running for cover. I guess that spear that the main defender is
holding up against the monster is very sharply rendered and sticks
out even at the tiny CD cover resolution, which is... good? The logo
is ace. I love prespective logos and even from early on when I toyed
with starting a band, a top priority was to draw its logo-to-be in
various prespectives. Prespective rocks! More a problem with the
logo is that the symmetry is off. The pumpkin is not in direct
middle. And it's maddening because 'Hell' and 'Ween' are the same
number of letters. The artist just had to make the two L's take a bit
more space each and it'd been... well, something a twelve year old
would have dissected less endlessly.

As
a Greek I wasn't very aware of what Halloween was, so the pumpkin
head in the logo (and other iconography by this band) was more a
Helloween thing than a Halloween thing, if you get my meaning. That
goes double for the - awful - pun in the name. It's like Halloween
you say but it's hellish? It's like, for real, man? Terrible idea for
a name, I'm sure the band, later in their success, agrees. I had no
idea at twelve it was even a pun. Look, I get that Heavy Metal names
have to be inversions. Iron Maiden. Black Sabbath. Judas Priest. I
get it. But putting the Hell in Halloween is just kind of stupid and
obvious. It's saved for me because Helloween the band are infinitely
more important than Halloween the dressing-up american holiday ever
came to be. To carry this point further, "Walls of Jericho"
is far more important to me than the Walls of Jericho themselves are.
In a more depressing note, that monster on the cover is probably more
important to me than his daddy, Eddie is.

As to those strange
words on the cover. What is a Mini-LP? I sure like how it's
Extra-long playing though! I have this one CD to listen to for
a year, good that's there's a lot of sounds on it! I didn't even know
that this CD includes the 'Helloween E.P', however. And the cover
doesn't mention it either. When I redownloaded a better sounding rip
of this than I had made on WMA on my very first personal computer, I
was shocked to find that the record starts with "Walls of
Jericho", not "Starlight" as I had been used to for a
decade and a half. For me that just isn't right, so we're going to
talk about the Helloween E.P. both as a part and at odds with the
rest of this material, starting with the next post.

Does
anybody really need 71:30 of Helloween all in one go? There's record
label pressure for you. It would plague Helloween and Gamma Ray for a
long time, Noise wanting them to make their next 70 minute opus. As a
child I would never put on a record and listen to just half of it, so
this was an endeavor to sit through. I still don't like to
turn songs off,
but I have grown a lot more lenient with skipping tracks altogether.
That's a practice that dates as far back as my infatuation with this
record because let's face it... there's a couple of bad tracks on
here. But we'll get to them.

Things I realized about this
cover later in life are obvious, I guess. Heavy Metal covers like to
have monsters and violence on them, so Helloween half-heartedly
followed suit. The monster is an aforementioned Eddie rip-off,
because all Heavy Metal bands owe it to their fans to have a mascot
to make merchandise of. Little did young Helloween know that their
real mascot potential was in silly pumpkin-head comedic caricatures
and not in Eddie-son here. Kai Hansen would keep this monster when he
would leave Helloween to go start Gamma Ray, for good or worse. I
also learned that '80s cover artists like to airbrush and they
especially like to do highlights with white airbrush, which looks
awful and unnatural. In the same vein I also learned that most of
these covers must have been done in a real hurry and without
much reference. The latter perhaps is a good thing to make this
art individual-looking, the former never is for any art,
ever.

Edda and Uwe Karczewski are credited in the
booklet for this creation. The idea for the cover goes to guitarist
M. Weikath. We are all much obliged.

6 comments:

I really enjoyed the subject treatment of this post. I'm testing my own thoughts before replying further. My stream includes considering the role of the illustration and its relation to the music. Does the music program continue through jacket? How effective or not was this achieved?

Seen through the experience of 12 year old as well as current Helm provokes a dialogue with my own experience and aesthetics.

Specific to Helloween's Walls of Jericho album cover, I feel a little more should be said about the destroyers' muscular arm, the motion blurs at the fist and fallen, and also the seemingly illogical shadow behind the center bottom fallen figure.

I would say that the music has little relation to the cover, actually. I am willing to return to this question mid-examination (when I'll talk about the inner sleeve images and other miscellainea) but I do not think there's really that much synergy between cover and music. Keeper of the Seven Keys pt.1 and pt.2, though I like them less, do a better job on this front.

Good call on the muscular arms and motion blur. Really, the only aspect of real grit in this cover. The music itself is very taught and organic, obviously played without much studio wizardry to help it. It's a shame a more immediately powerful cover could not present it.

The illogical shadow is the shadow of the top piece of debris, I think.

I started out as that guy Alex, at quite a younger age than 28. I am making progress in not being that guy, reevaluating what it means to be 'true' and not burning bridges. I hope by 30 that aspect of metaldom will be a nonissue for me. It's hard, still, sometimes, with some of the hipster cra- uh, the... product of questionable sincerity that passes for heavy metal these days, but I'll get there. If you see the Buddha on the road, you must kill them.

Linus, you'll be surprised just how much harmonic movement this otherwise 'speed metal' record has to offer. Much less muscular than say, Exciter!